A young Iraqi refugee living at the Ashty camp displacement center in Iraq greets a visitor.(photo: John E. Kozar)

Msgr. John E. Kozar, CNEWA’s president, has just returned from making a pastoral visit to Iraq and Egypt, where he saw first-hand some of the challenges facing Christians fleeing persecution in that troubled part of the world.

Next week, Msgr. Kozar will share his insights and experiences in a special evening at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, New York.

We invite you to join us for this important event, in an effort to raise awareness and funds to aid Christian families in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and beyond. It will be an opportunity to learn more about the crisis facing the people of the Middle East — and how you can help. The problems of our suffering brothers and sisters in that region right now are urgent, and the needs are great. Donations will be greatly appreciated.

At the Good Shepherd Church in Suez, one of the sisters has saved the first rock that broke through the window of the church in 2013, when hundreds protested the ouster of President Muhammed Morsi. To learn more about efforts to rebuild after the violence, read “Out of the Ashes” in the Spring 2015 edition of ONE. (photo: David Degner)

Iraqi Christian refugee Steven Osama, a 27-year-old from Mosul, plays guitar on his bed at St. Ephraim's Syrian Orthodox Church, where the church provides shelter for Iraqi Christian refugees, in Amman, Jordan. To learn more about the lives of Iraqis like Steven Osama, check out “Finding Sanctuary in Jordan” in the Spring 2015 edition of ONE. (photo: Nader Daoud)

In this image from March, Khanon Hamo from Kobani tends to her 7-month-old twins in her tent in a refugee camp in Suruc, in the province of Sanliurfa, Turkey. Turkey has one of the largest populations of Syrian refugees fleeing the ongoing civil war, with official estimates currentlyat 1.6 million. (photo: Carl Court/Getty Images)

Turkish border crackdown imperils Syrian refugees(Voice of America) Turkish authorities have tightened controls, ending their open-door policy for Syrian refugees and making it more difficult for Syrians to enter Turkey and for international journalists to cover the war. There are even reports of people being fired upon as they approach the border...

European bishops to discuss dialogue with Muslims(Vatican Radio) The Council of European Bishops’ Conferences is having its 4th meeting of bishops and delegates in charge of relations with Muslims in Europe. The meeting is being held at the Abbey of Saint Maurice in Switzerland this week and will last for three days. Two key areas which will be covered are dialogue between Christians and Muslims, along with sociological realities...

Report: Hundreds of Russian soldiers died in Ukraine(The New York Times) Russian opposition activists published a report Tuesday that they claim proves that Russia is deeply involved in the war in Ukraine, seeking to counter overwhelming state media reports casting the events as a local uprising against the Ukrainian government. Prominent Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov was working on the report, entitled “Putin.War,” after Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the time of his murder in February. Drawing on media accounts, testimonies from relatives and other representatives of dead soldiers and confidential sources, the 64-page report maintains that hundreds of Russian troops have died fighting in a war that has cost Russia hundreds of millions of dollars...

Life in Syria for Christians: teaching tolerance and harmony among the faithful(Deseret News) Since 2013, I had traveled to Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan as part of my Project Amal ou Salam, which translates from Arabic to mean Project Hope and Peace. I had led workshops to over 5,000 kids, teaching them about diversity, tolerance and nonviolence. Having grown up in Syria, leaving at the age of 17 to attend university in Canada, this was my way of giving back to the future of my country. But I have also learned as well. The more Syrian children I work with, the more I understand the dynamics of Syrian society that I hadn’t noticed before...

I began covering the successive waves of refugees descending upon Jordan nearly 12 years ago. At that time, most Iraqis fled their country because the U.S.-led invasion and its turbulent aftermath of sectarian violence made parts of the embattled land — especially the capital, Baghdad — unsafe.

Among some of those who arrived in Jordan were Iraqi Christians, whose family members were kidnapped for ransom and sometimes brutally killed or whose neighborhoods and churches were targeted by suicide bombers.

Then came the Syrians — who for the most part are Sunni Muslim civilians fleeing terrible violence by both government forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and extremist militants. Most Syrian Christians have escaped to Lebanon, rather than Jordan.

Both sets of refugees made the decision to leave their homes and countries due to spiraling, horrific violence and protracted war. The decisions were not made lightly. Many Syrians fled with just the clothes on their backs or carried a couple of plastic bags with their treasured items, thinking and hoping they would soon return home.

But with the Iraqi Christians, a different narrative is at play. Somehow, the despair and pain they feel and project seems deeper and rawer.

ISIS militants cruelly and brutally forced these original inhabitants of Mosul and the villages of the Ninevah Plain for the past 1,600 years out of their historic Christian heartland. Why should they recant their faith and that of their forefathers or be forced to pay a so-called protection tax? Why should they be run out of town by the sword? These are some of the questions they ponder.

An Iraqi Christian in his mid-60’s said it wasn’t just the fact that the extremists took over the businesses he had worked for his entire life. What really galled him was that a militant from Afghanistan was living in his home — a cherished house that had been in his family for generations.

The Christians were sometimes betrayed by their Muslim neighbors. The country’s own security forces failed to defend them in their hour of need.

Such betrayal is hard to come to grasp and difficult to overcome. Many say that is why — as much as they long to return to their beloved homes and land — they can never go back.

How will these refugees work out the Christian tenets of forgiveness and grace to combat the natural tendencies toward despair and bitterness in the face of such great loss? These are the challenges that loom as they ponder what kind of future awaits them and where.

One 10-year-old Iraqi girl, named Myriam, however, has made the decision to forgive her ISIS persecutors.

TV interviews with Myriam and the brother of two Egyptian laborers beheaded in Libya by the extremists — both voicing forgiveness — have been watched by at least one million viewers in the Arab world and are sparking positive social media comment.

A columnist in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Nahar said the interview by the Christian SAT-7 network with Myriam “should be presented in Lebanese schools as a lesson in humanity.”

A small shrine adorns the home of Marlene Dachache, who works as a nurse at a charity dispensary in Beirut, and her husband Joseph. The family has been struggling to make ends meet since the influx of Syrian refugees in the country. To read more, check out “Lebanon on the Brink” in the Spring 2015 edition of ONE. (photo: Tamara Abdul Hadi)

In this image from 2014, Cardinal George Pell gestures as he leaves the extraordinary Synod of Bishops at the Vatican. The cardinal has praised efforts at dialogue between Christians and Jews on the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate. (photo: Paul Haring/CNS)

Cardinal praises efforts to Christians and Jews(Vatican Radio) Cardinal George Pell has praised the efforts of participants in an historic international gathering of Christian and Jewish leaders in Israel to mark the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of the Conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate, on the Church’s relation to non-Christian religions...

Ukraine port braces for attack(Bloomberg) Ukraine’s eastern port of Mariupol is bracing for attack. Army vehicles rumble down streets, windows are fortified to shield against shell damage and signs pasted to apartment blocks point people to their nearest bomb shelter. Locals fear pro-Russian separatists will unleash an assault on their city now that President Vladimir Putin has finished hosting world leaders to mark the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany. “Everyone’s talking about it,” said Iryna Hrynko, 40, a designer who arrived last year after fleeing the rebels’ Donetsk stronghold. “Friends back home even tell me about an attack...”

Iraq begins training Sunni fighters to battle ISIS(The Wall Street Journal) Iraq’s Shiite-led government has begun training Sunni tribal fighters here in the western province of Anbar, in an urgent U.S.-backed initiative to stem recent advances by Islamic State. The setbacks in Anbar have exposed the need for trusted and equipped Sunni fighters to help turn momentum against Islamic State and dry up the extremists’ pool of potential recruits. “When the government fails, people turn to Islamic State,” said Mohammad Abu Risha, a young tribal sheik from Anbar who commands 150 fighters. “The tribes don’t trust the government, and the government doesn’t trust the tribes...”

Suicide bombers attack hospital in Syria(AFP) Suicide bombers attacked a hospital in northwestern Syria on Sunday morning where around 250 soldiers and civilians have been trapped for two weeks, a monitoring group said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the rebels, including members of a branch of Al-Qaeda, stormed the complex in the town of Jisr al-Shughur, having already captured the surrounding area a fortnight ago. Harrowing pictures show the scale of the assault, with the suicide bomber’s car bomb sending fireballs and plumes of thick black smoke into the air. it is not yet known how many people were killed in the attack...

Russian Orthodox Church sends over a million dollars to Ukrainian refugees(Christian Telegraph) The Russian Orthodox Church sent Ukrainian refugees more than 75 million of rubles (nearly 1.5 million of dollars) during last 9 months, reports Christian Telegraph. “Last summer we organized the center of help for civilians of Ukraine. By 24 April 2015 we received more than 20,000 appeals from refugees,” stated Vladimir Legoida, Chairman of the Synodal Informational Department of the Russian Orthodox Church...

Long before there was ISIS, civil war in Syria, an Arab Spring, Al Qaeda, the U.S. invasions of Iraq, civil war in Lebanon, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, Middle East Christians were on the move. Whether hiding from persecution by Jewish leaders, Roman emperors, Persian forces, Byzantine bishops, Muslim Arab invaders or Ottoman bureaucrats, the region’s Christians demonstrated agility, tenacity and the will to survive. As they moved from place to place — leaving behind their ancient centers of Antioch or Edessa — Middle East Christians preserved their identities, their cultures, their languages, their rites and their unique approaches to the one Christian faith. They reestablished their monasteries and convents, churches and schools from Beirut to Baghdad, prospering in the modern era even with the rise of ideological fanaticism and its destructive twin, intolerance.
But the sixth day of August 2014 will be forever seared into the psyches of all Middle East Christians. For on that day, maniacal extremists upended the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqi Christians, forcing them to flee their homes, leaving behind everything in a matter of minutes.

The human cost of the displacement of the Middle East’s Christians is tremendous. Although they may account for only about 5 percent of the region’s population — about 15.5 million people — Christians dominate the region’s middle classes, exercising prominence in the tourism industry, commercial and skilled labor sectors, and the civil service. And as they flee the extremists rapidly taking hold in the region, moderates from other communities follow, leaving behind those who cannot leave — the poor, the uneducated, the elderly and the infirmed — and those who stand to gain by fanning the flames of hate.

...The flight of Christians from the region is arduous and painfully slow. While hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes in Iraq and Syria, most exist in a sort of limbo, hunkering down with friends and family in safer areas of Lebanon, Syria’s Valley of the Christians, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or Iraqi Kurdistan. Some 12,000 Syrian Armenian Christians have found refuge in Armenia, but few others have acquired the coveted visas necessary to emigrate to the Americas, Europe or Oceania, where most Middle Eastern Christians now live.

Just a few months into their exile, the Rifo family was not yet able to accept the possibility of emigration.

“We all agree that this is something we don’t want to think of,” said the matriarch of the family, Ibtihaj. “We will go back to our houses, even if the house is destroyed. Returning home is the only possibility we are thinking of and we don’t want to think of any other possibility.”

Her husband Nabil had different thoughts.

“Even if we go back to our houses, we have lost our sense of security,” he said, adding that some of his non-Christian neighbors and colleagues were responsible for the looting of abandoned Christian houses. Others joined ISIS.

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pavlo Klimkin, receives a copy of ONE magazine from CNEWA’s Antin Sloboda during a meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy in Ottowa last week.(photo: Vicki Karpiak)

Last week I had a chance to attend a meeting with Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, at the Ukrainian Embassy in Ottawa. Mr. Klimkin’s recent visit to Canada to a large extent was an expression of gratitude to the Ukrainian-Canadian community and Canadian government for taking a leadership position in supporting Ukraine in this time of crisis.

At the end of the meeting I presented him with the newest addition of CNEWA’s magazine ONE. The cover story of the magazine has an article by Mark Raczkiewycz, “Casualties of War,” about the suffering of Ukrainian people and the ways Catholic charities — including CNEWA — are providing support to the affected population on the ground.

Besides providing resources for the internally displaced and other people in need, CNEWA plays also a very important role in sharing with the English-speaking world objective information on the situation on the ground. The article by Mark Raczkiewycz is a good example of CNEWA’s multifaceted involvement.

Here’s another example. On 29 May, CNEWA Canada and the Ukrainian National Federation of Ottawa-Gatineau Branch are organizing a special event in Ottawa to raise funds for Ukraine’s internally displaced. The funds will go to CNEWA’s long-term partner Caritas Ukraine, the main humanitarian charity of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Right now Caritas Ukraine provides support to over 80,000 victims of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. If you can be in Ottawa on 29 May, please join us at this event. Tickets are still available.

If you cannot come to Ottawa, please still consider making a meaningful donation for the victims of war in Ukraine. Just visit this link for details. Thank you.

Sister Ayelech chats with students during lunchtime at the Blessed Gebremichael Catholic School in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. To read her account of her life and vocation, check out “A Letter from Ethiopia” in the Spring edition of ONE. (photo: Petterik Wiggers)